'Cos I Want to be Little Again Sometimes

This is Belle (from Beauty and the Beast).
I had to draw her for a school project.

All this fairytale business is really starting to eat at my morale. Whether or not Disney told the stories right, Disney fairy tales were some of the first one's to help kickstart my imagination when I was little. One of the things I want to do the most right now is dissolve back to that childhood moment when the prince met the princess for the first time, or another character stepped foot onto the land of an entirely different world, or when dinosaurs started talking and broomsticks started dancing because that life had so much more promise than this adult life does.

I love, when in Telling the Truth, Buechner talks about that suppressed inner child in us mature, "well off" beings. We're so mature and think we have it all figured out (or at least have a handle on figuring it out) we forget the small magical things or dismiss them altogether. But secretly, that inner child is ensnared by the "silly" fairytales; and it's the best stories that catch that child that really interact with us.

One thing I notice when I look back on the crazy fairy tale movies I used to watch is how filled with hope I was, and how that hope and feeling resolved me to wanting to do something more. I remember distinctly feeling like there was nothing I couldn't do. I had an imagination so vivid that this world became minuscule, boring, and I began to turn it into a fantastical world where I saw, felt and lived in hope.

Of course, that kind of dreaming is dying now, and sometimes it's scary to just hope.

To hope that maybe I'm that ordinary kid that hardly has a head on their shoulders because it's in the clouds but will one day be the extraordinary someone that everyone else can look at and smile. To hope that maybe, on the nights when it hurts so much that when I close my eyes I'll wake up somewhere else and start over and fight the local dragon to defend my castle instead of waking up to more monotony. To hope that when the rest of this dying world is panting it's last breaths I can stand up and say with full confidence that there is hope if people could just open their eyes and unclog their ears.

That's what fairy tales do for my inner child. They feed me hope, and really, it's only a child you can give hope because adults are just too well off to deal with that nonsense. And thinking about that reminds me just what an artist is: a child. We'll get smacked with the belt sometimes for our curiosity and our hope.

As an artist, we were forced to grow up before everyone else, but we'll be younger than everyone else forever, because it's our job to speak to the child inside our viewers.